Curiosity : A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry

by Benedict, Barbara M.

• ISBN13: 9780226042640
• ISBN10: 0226042642
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

"Pithy and wide-ranging. . . . This study provides a fresh new lens through which to reinvestigate the whole of early modern English literature."--Library Journal In this striking social history, Barbara M. Benedict draws on the texts of the early modern period to discover the era's attitudes toward curiosity, a trait we learn was often depicted as an unsavory form of transgression or cultural ambition.

Author Biography

Barbara M. Benedict is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English, and chair of the Department of English, at Trinity College, Connecticut. She is the author of Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies and Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745-1800.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Inspecting and Spectating: Monsters, Rarities, and Investigators	p. 1
Regulating Curiosity	p. 25
The Discipline of Fraud	p. 28
Curiosity as Second Sight	p. 52
Consuming Curiosity	p. 71
Monstrous Modernity and Curious Art	p. 74
The Curious Eye	p. 92
From the Curious to the Curio	p. 118
The Inquiry of Eve	p. 121
Women as Closeted Curiosities	p. 134
Connoisseurship in the Mental Cabinet	p. 158
Curiosities of Artful Nature	p. 164
Collecting Culture in the Printed Museum	p. 180
Performing Curiosity	p. 202
The Curious Control of Nature	p. 206
Curiosity as Social Reform	p. 228
Conclusion: Transgression and Ambition	p. 245
Notes	p. 255
Index	p. 313
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